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Beverly Crusher is a major character in Star Trek: The Next Generation, played by Gates McFadden. A supercharged doctor, she serves as chief medical officer aboard the USS Enterprise in all but season 2 of the show, when she's off on Earth heading up Starfleet Medical.

She was married to the late Jack Crusher and has a son, Wesley, a classic Marty-Stu who has the distinction of being the most hated character in all Trek. Her closest associates in canon are Deanna Troi and Captain Jean-Luc Picard, with whom she has a deep friendship that often strays towards romance without ever quite reaching it. Her passionate affair with the one-off Odan leads to a night with Will Riker while he's host to the Trill's symbiont. Fans were disappointed that Beverly rejected the possibility of an f/f relationship with Odan's new female host.

In the few minutes when she's not being a doctor, she enjoys music, takes part in theatrical productions and is a mean tap dancer.

Fan perspectives

Perclexed writes: Feisty, elegant, intelligent...Crusher is all these and more. An excellent doctor, she saves the hides of every senior officer at least once (if not five or six or ten) times over the course of their adventures.[1]

Fanfiction

Beverly is a fairly popular character with fanwriters. By far the most common pairing is with Picard, generally known as Picard/Crusher (despite the potential for mix-up with Wesley, ewww) or sometimes BONC (Beverly on Jean-Luc), which is probably the predominant het pairing in the TNG fandom. Fans of the P/C pairing are sometimes known as BONCers. Beverly's husband was a friend of Picard and was killed while serving under him, making for pre-series stories with abundant angst potential and the occasional threesome. Other m/f pairings are comparatively rare, though several stories explore the aftermath of her night with Will during the Odan episode.

Nonfiction

Fan art

Fansites

The BONC Home Page -- site of the Picard/Crusher mailing list, BONClassic. We're a private mailing list dedicated to just one thing: getting our favorite two Star Trek characters together in as many ways, shapes, forms and lifetimes as humanly possible.[2]